Romanticism Romanticism And The Margins

This book approaches Byron from a completely new angle: no longer seen in terms of his status as a celebrity and a star on the book-selling market, Byron is instead seen as an outsider both in Regency society and, even more so, for his iconoclastic views of life and literature.

This is the first critical study of Romantic-era annotation or marginalia – footnotes, endnotes, glossaries – which formed a vital site of literary interaction.

British Romanticism and the Literature of Human Interest explores the importance to Romantic literature of a concept of human interest. It examines a range of literary experiments to engage readers through subjects and styles that were at once "interesting" and that, in principle, were in their "interest." These experiments put in question relationships between poetry and prose; lyric and narrative; and literature and popular media. The book places literary works by a range of nineteenth-century writers including William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary and Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Matthew Arnold into dialogue with a variety of non-literary and paraliterary forms ranging from newspapers to footnotes. The book investigates the generic structures of Romantic literature and the negotiation of the status of literature in the period in relation to a new media landscape. It explores the self-theorization of Romantic literature and argues for its value to contemporary literary criticism.

This book features a collection of essays, shedding subversively new light on Romanticism and its canon of big-six, white, male Romantics by focusing on marginalised, forgotten and lost writers and their long-neglected works. Probing the realms of literary and cultural lostness, this book identifies different strata of oblivion and shows how densely the net of contacts and rivalries was woven around the ostensibly monolithic stars of the Romantic age. It reveals how the lost poets inspired the production of anthologised poetry, that they served as indispensable muses, sidekicks and interlocutors of the big six and that their relevance for the literary scene has been continuously underrated. This is also surprisingly true for some creators of famous one-hit wonders (Frankenstein, The Vampyre) who were suddenly rocketed to fame or notoriety, but could not help seeing their other works of fiction turning into abortive flops.

Traces how progressive liberals in Edwardian Britain responded to contemporary intellectual trends.

The Handbook of British Romanticism is a state of the art investigation of Romantic literature and theory, a field that probably changed more quickly and more fundamentally than any other traditional era in literary studies. Since the early 1980s, Romantic studies has widened its scope significantly: The canon has been expanded, hitherto ignored genres have been investigated and new topics of research explored. After these profound changes, intensified by the general crisis of literary theory since the turn of the millennium, traditional concepts such as subjectivity, imagination and the creative genius have lost their status as paradigms defining Romanticism. The handbook will feature discussions of key concepts such as history, class, gender, science and the use of media as well as a thorough account of the most central literary genres around the turn of the 19th century. The focus of the book, however, will lie on a discussion of key literary texts in the light of the most recent theoretical developments. Thus, the Handbook of British Romanticism will provide students with an introduction to Romantic literature in general and literary scholars with a discussion of innovative and groundbreaking theoretical developments.

This book examines the relationship between Romantic writing and the rapidly expanding British Empire.